Summary:

I said in the book, I think TheGlobe.com was the quintessential dot-com company. We spoke to one of the cofounders previously, Todd Krizelman. Todd was great, but he was time constrained and he didn’t quite get as personal about the story as I would have hoped. Well, I finally got to talk to the other founder of TheGlobe, Stephan Paternot. And Stephan was… AMAZING. He shared the whole story, the whole wild ride, from a historical angle, from a business angle, from an entrepreneurial angle and also, from a very personal angle. THIS the dot-com era story I’ve been looking for for years. It’s also the story of probably the most important pioneer of social media before there was even a term for such a thing. And by the way… that TV Show that just came out on NAT GEO, Valley of the Boom? THIS IS THAT STORY. Stephan just re-released his book, A Very Public Offering: The Story of theglobe.com and the First Internet Revolution.

Summary:

David Schwartz is the Chief Technology Officer at Ripple, the company behind the cryptocurrency XRP. What is it like to start, build and build out a crypto startup? Is it different than the web and internet startups that we’ve covered on this show for years? What is Ripple? How is it unique in the crypto ecosystem? What is it trying to do for the world? All of this… and yes, why is crypto so tribal… and yes… where is the crypto space even at in this moment in time (December 9th, 2018, btw, for posterity).

Summary:

Ken Norton is a partner at GV, Alphabets venture capital arm, but before that, he was a product manager at Google, where he led the development of products like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Mobile Maps. But he was also early at JotSpot which became Google sites, was a product manager at Yahoo, was an early employee at CNET and was CTO of Snap, a company probably none of you have ever heard of but I’ve been dying to talk about for years. No. Not snapchat. The original Snap. The dotcom era snap. So, this is another great episode with a guy who has played roles in a ton of our favorites companies and topics.

Summary:

Matt Britton not only sold the first ads to and for Facebook, way back in 2004, he gives us a really insightful and, frankly, unbiased look at what Facebook was like as a company in its very earliest days.

Summary:

I figure most of you should know who Matt Cutts is, but if you don’t, let’s just leave it at this: he’s about to give you the best, most behind-the-scenes oral history of early Google we’ve gotten so far on this podcast. He was the head of Google’s web spam team for nearly 15 years. He’s also the current head of the USDS, so if you what to know what YOU can do for your country—if you’re in technology and you want to make the government work better—listen to this episode!

Summary:

John McCrea is a Zelig-like personality who pops up in so many of the narratives we’ve already covered: Apple. Netscape. Doing battle with Microsoft. This is part one, mostly about Silicon Graphics, a company I had been thinking about doing an episode on for a while now, to really rejuvenate that company’s reputation, historically. For reasons that will be obvious when you listen.

Summary:

This story has gone down in Silicon Valley lore as the ultimate cautionary tale. Digg was the earliest high flying startup in early social media. But then, other startups like Facebook and Twitter started to steal the limelight. So Digg tried to keep up by launching the infamous Digg version 4. And… it’s a disaster. Users hate it. So much so, that many people feel that the reason Reddit is Reddit today is because the Digg community fled there en-masse. Digg Version 4 has become a much cited horror story for when a redesign can be so disruptive it can kill a company. So, what’s the real story behind this urban legend? Today, we talk to Will Larson, who today is at Stripe, was a young engineer working on the launch of Digg version 4.

Summary:

Lisa Napoli got a job straight out of college at CNN in its earliest days, which is a crazy startup story in it’s own right. But then she worked for a time at Delphi, which was an early online service and competitor to AOL and Prodigy that I don’t think we’ve covered much here before. And then she helped bring the NYTimes online with CyberTimes, which, as she said, is forgotten to history even by the New York Times. Then on to MSNBC, a crazy hybrid tech and media startup that I don’t think we’ve discussed much either. There’s just so many great stories here. Please enjoy this conversation with Lisa Napoli.

Summary:

Rosanne Siino has been on my list to talk to from day one of this podcast. As you know, I started by reaching out to Netscape folks and Rosanne was the head of communications for that very first dotcom company. She saw it all, she can give us her take on both the engineering side and the management side, since she was uniquely able to observe both. Rosanne and I were recently on a documentary series currently airing on A&E in the US, The Untold Story of the 90s. So, I reached out, and we recoded this fantastic extended interview about all things Netscape and about the very birth of the Internet Era.